Daily catch-up: Corbyn is all broken promises, spin and unpopular anti-capitalism
Plus some more obscure sorrows and what Molesworth would call some peotry
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Your support makes all the difference.The “new politics” my aunt. Having been found out as a same-old sexist with his top appointments, Jeremy Corbyn has persuaded some of his more gullible followers that he has kept his pledge to have equal numbers of women and men in his whole shadow cabinet – indeed that he has more women than men in his shadow cabinet.
This has been achieved only by redefining “member of the shadow cabinet”. I can find no official list online, but the party line is that there are 15 women and 13 men in the shadow cabinet. This is reflected in the line-up that someone has recorded on Wikipedia.
But if we look at the 22 people who shadow full members of the actual Cabinet, there are 12 men and 10 women.
Broken promises and spin, that is all Corbyn is. (For the anti-capitalism, see below.)
• After my Top 10 Obscure Sorrows, James Undy asks if there is a word (maybe German?) for the obscure sorrow of thinking “I’m going to have to watch Labour Conference next week”.
Andrew Rhodes suggested Keinepunktenlinkentraurigkeit. Spinning Hugo thought of Verkrapptfreude, a tribute to the late wonderful Norman Geras. And Undy himself wondered about Really Bad Godesberg ...
But perhaps it is, from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows via Geoff Jein, Lachesism: n. the desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall – which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.
• We hope you like the Independent’s new website. Let us know if there are any problems with it. My new-look author page is here.
• This by Brian Bilston is called “Fall”:
she loved to catch
the falling leaves
in autumn
she’d
sit
and wait
until
she
cautumn
• “Only a fool would write off Mr Corbyn”, wrote Mary Riddell on Tuesday. Proud to be a fool, then. Why Corbynism isn’t going to work, in one chart:
• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain for this:
“You’re rubbish at acting and we’re just not going to support you.”
Negative Equity.
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